It’s fair to say that we’ve come a long way in the past 100 years or so in terms of audio/visual technology. Record players have been replaced with iPods and smartphones and instead of black and white TVs, we now have 3D TV’s or plasma screens in our living rooms. It’s probably hard then to take our minds back to the late 19th century when the TV wasn’t even invented yet or the radio, for that matter. In fact, the only sounds that people would have been hearing in your average home, were those of the voices of other people living there.

Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor, made history when in 1894, at the age of 20, he invented a spark transmitter with antenna at his home in Bologna, Italy. He put the wheels in motion for what we now know as the radio. A few years later in 1901, using a 122-metre (400-foot) kite-supported antenna for reception, Marconi successfully transmitted a radio message from his company's high-power station in Cornwall to St John's, Newfoundland. This was the first successful transatlantic radiotelegraph message.

As time moved on we saw many more phenomenal advancements in audio and visual technology that changed the way we receive information and how we are entertained. To find out more about some of the most important inventions in history check out our informative infographic timeline on audio/visual technology.